Doris Taylor: Growing a Beating Heart Book

'The writing of this book was not always a labor of love.'

This is a book about the friendship between Eleanor Roosevelt and Dr David Gurewitsch, her personal physician and friend, during the last fifteen years of Mrs Roosevelt's life. This account is written by David's wife Edna and draws on both the diaries David kept and the hundreds of letters that he and Mrs Roosevelt exchanged over the years of their friendship. In 1962, in one of her letters to Dr Gurewitsch, Mrs Roosevelt had written: 'Above all others you are the one to whom my heart is tied.' Theirs was an intense relationship: they often travelled and entertained together and, after his marriage to Edna in February 1958, the three of them bought and lived in a town house in Manhattan which they divided into two separate apartments.

Mrs Gurewitch provides a unique perspective on their private friendship: she has her own memories of each of them as well as their voluminous correspondence and Dr Gurewitsch's diaries. She writes that:

'As a physician, David had private recognition, but he craved public approval. Mrs Roosevelt had public recognition, but she craved intimacy. Each satisfied the other's hunger for acceptance. It was a fair exchange.'

She writes as well that:

'Despite the closeness of their bond, evidenced in her extremely caring letters to him, David and Mrs Roosevelt were never lovers. Indeed, the tragedy of this superior woman was that she never had the absolute, intimate love of a man.'

The Eleanor Roosevelt who appears through the pages of this book is a kind and generous woman, interested in others, but also lonely and vulnerable, sometimes jealous and sometimes apparently overwhelmed by feelings of inadequacy. And yet, despite these insecurities, Mrs Roosevelt was able to make an enormous contribution to the USA (and the world). A woman born in the late nineteenth century, living through times when few women had any significant role in public life, Mrs Roosevelt seems to have met many challenges of the 20th century with courage and dignity.

'The profound contrast between Mrs Roosevelt's dependence upon receiving love and her considerable awareness of the power of her capabilities - the bottomless neediness that coexisted with her enormous strength - never ceases to amaze me.'

While this book was primarily about David Gurewitsch and Eleanor Roosevelt, I find myself wondering about the impact of their close friendship on Edna Gurewitsch's life as David's wife. It is often true that while two is company, three is a crowd.

I enjoyed reading this book: it offered me a different and human perspective of Eleanor Roosevelt. Edna Gurewitsch writes: 'She was one of the few people in this world in which greatness and modesty coexisted'.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith